Session Information
32 SES 14, Quality Education & UN Sustainable Development Goal 4: Inter-Country Dialogues about Enactment
Symposium
Contribution
Within the pressures of a crowded curriculum and in an increasingly diversified classroom, one of our major challenges is to satisfactorily respond to the learning needs of every student in a fair and equitable manner and create opportunities to promote lifelong learning. This becomes a complex undertaking in the English as a Foreign Language (EFL) context of Bangladesh where although English is taught as a compulsory subject in school, it is often still seen as a “purely instrumentalist endeavour” (Chowdhury & Kabir, 2014). One reason for this is the sheer number of students - with over 17 million children learning English, Bangladesh boasts one of the largest primary second language English populations in the world (Hamid & Honan 2012). Naturally, students’ performance in English remains generally very poor (Chowdhury & Kamal 2014) with the average English language skill level of a university student being equivalent to the Class 7 level (Imam, 2005). However, many studies have shown that students’ poor performance often has nothing to do with class size, but our approach to teaching, where a one-size-fits-all approach is often adopted as a pragmatic solution to tackle ‘typical’ problems of ‘typical’ students. Despite research showing its ineffectiveness, such one-size-fits-all instruction still predominates English teaching in Bangladeshi schools. In this paper we discuss how such a practice is not just ineffective, but socially unjust and inequitable. This paper problematises the dangers of homogenising and thus oversimplifying the needs of our students as ‘typical’ learners. It shows how adopting a more responsive approach with differentiated instruction – one that allows teachers to accommodate and build on students' diverse learning needs by acknowledging, respecting and having an increased awareness of the individual needs of students with physical and learning disabilities, life experiences, learning preferences, personal interests, as well as varying levels of readiness - can have a lot more benefits beyond the classroom. This paper brings local and Australian perspectives and addresses organisational learning at national, university and school levels, discussing our core agenda of providing quality equitable, socially just and fair learning opportunities to all students. It will also discuss some of the mechanics of managing a differentiated classroom and the practicalities of ensuring this within the confines of state-regulated curriculum and assessment. It discusses the value of organisational learning and the role of institutional memory in providing a more sustainable model of teaching in a resource-constrained environment.
References
Chowdhury, R., & Kabir, A. H. (2014). Language wars: English education policy and practice in Bangladesh. Multilingual Education, 4(1), 16. DOI: 10.1186/s13616-014-0021-2. Chowdhury, R., & Kamal, M. (2014). Balancing conformity and empowerment: The challenges of critical needs analysis in an EAP course at Dhaka University. In I. Liyanage & T. Walker (Eds.), EAP in Asia: Negotiating appropriate practices in a global context (pp. 79-92). Rotterdam: Sense Publishers. Hamid, M. O. & Honan, E. (2012). Communicative English in the primary classroom: implications for English-in-education policy and practice in Bangladesh. Language, Culture and Curriculum 25(2), 139–156. DOI: 10.1080/07908318.2012.678854. Imam, S. R. (2005). English as a global language and the question of nation-building education in Bangladesh. Comparative Education, 41(4), 471–486. DOI:10.1080/03050060500317588.
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